Energy is the lifeblood of modern societies. Energy services are woven throughout the fabric of modern life, rural or urban, in the developed world. A successful global future energy system will provide energy security, economic security, and health and environmental security: energy that is clean, available, affordable and reliable. Addressing the challenge of climate change offers an opportunity to make progress on all those broad goals with energy technologies that are clean, deployable at large scale, and fully cost-competitive.
Technology improvements have started a transition away from an energy system that is dominated by fossil fuels. Deep reductions in the cost of technologies like solar photovoltaics and wind power generation, increasing energy efficiency, and efforts to modernize the transmission and distribution of electric power, including deployment of energy storage, are reshaping the energy landscape for the United States and the world. Recent progress has been impressive, but there is much more to be done. This presentation examines options for meeting those challenges, outlines the need for additional energy innovation, and explores research and development pathways that offer important opportunities for continued progress toward those goals. The range of opportunities available to create a clean energy transformation has never been bigger, and we can address the climate challenge if we apply what we know how to do now in a sustained way and fill the innovation pipeline for the future.
Student Award and Shoemaker Lecture Reception, 3:00–4:00 p.m. in the EMS Museum Gallery